Ball ends really are a pain in the ass to get working. There's always tool clearance problems. I'm surprised you got away with turning the back side away from the chuck. I'd never program cuts in that direction for a couple of reasons. If your running a bar feeder and your tooling gets dull it can pull the material out from the chuck which not only ruins the part but may crash a finishing tool coming up next in the program. It also ruins collets and chuck jaws when you pull material through or spin parts because of the excess material you pulled out. I may "fix" a program by writing code by hand but I don't miss programming by hand at all. There's plenty of code generators these days that can whip up a rough program and I can copy and paste code segments far faster than I can type it into a control panel. I've done ball ends with cutoff tools but if I got room in the CNC for another tool I prefer a 180 degree diamond point for roughing out the back side.
fusion did the toolpath. one of the first crashes was because there was not enough leadout and the triangular remnant pulled the part out. the tool geometry also tended to really pull the cutter hard left (my bad grind didn't help) and that was lifting the toolpost and cross slide off. The gib just couldn't hold it down.... The first one (not on video) with an unmodified cuttoff tool went pretty well so my confidence was up when I started. That was quickly squashed.
@@JesseSchoch I don't use Fusion because of their "pay to play" attitude making it unreliable as a future home shop program. I'd be surprised if there wasn't a setting within the program to control path direction during cuts. Since it's known more of a design program rather than a tool path program they may have not made the feature as practical as they do for milling machine tool paths. Going back and forth is common with modern CNC mills to save time. The old manual machines had too much backlash and slop and you always cut in specific directions to prevent the tool from grabbing or digging in and breaking. Even with modern CNC machines they do work better if you set your tool paths up as if it were an older manual machine with some slop especially during the finish passes to avoid chatter. You got a great finish on your ball end so you got that dialed in for your machine. Being retired I have not even turned my CNC mills or lathes on in a couple of years but I do follow some of the FreeCAD development. Like most modern programs it's shooting ahead fast in the drawing department but always lagging in the tool path department. And they always put milling path development ahead of lathe path development for some reason. Maybe it has something to do with most modern shops having lathe guys and mill guys where in the old days you did it all?
The amount of times you crashed and said eff it and did it again is comedy but at the end you figured it out
Ball ends really are a pain in the ass to get working. There's always tool clearance problems.
I'm surprised you got away with turning the back side away from the chuck. I'd never program cuts in that direction for a couple of reasons.
If your running a bar feeder and your tooling gets dull it can pull the material out from the chuck which not only ruins the part but may crash a finishing tool coming up next in the program.
It also ruins collets and chuck jaws when you pull material through or spin parts because of the excess material you pulled out.
I may "fix" a program by writing code by hand but I don't miss programming by hand at all. There's plenty of code generators these days that can whip up a rough program and I can copy and paste code segments far faster than I can type it into a control panel.
I've done ball ends with cutoff tools but if I got room in the CNC for another tool I prefer a 180 degree diamond point for roughing out the back side.
fusion did the toolpath. one of the first crashes was because there was not enough leadout and the triangular remnant pulled the part out. the tool geometry also tended to really pull the cutter hard left (my bad grind didn't help) and that was lifting the toolpost and cross slide off. The gib just couldn't hold it down.... The first one (not on video) with an unmodified cuttoff tool went pretty well so my confidence was up when I started. That was quickly squashed.
@@JesseSchoch I don't use Fusion because of their "pay to play" attitude making it unreliable as a future home shop program.
I'd be surprised if there wasn't a setting within the program to control path direction during cuts.
Since it's known more of a design program rather than a tool path program they may have not made the feature as practical as they do for milling machine tool paths.
Going back and forth is common with modern CNC mills to save time. The old manual machines had too much backlash and slop and you always cut in specific directions to prevent the tool from grabbing or digging in and breaking.
Even with modern CNC machines they do work better if you set your tool paths up as if it were an older manual machine with some slop especially during the finish passes to avoid chatter. You got a great finish on your ball end so you got that dialed in for your machine.
Being retired I have not even turned my CNC mills or lathes on in a couple of years but I do follow some of the FreeCAD development.
Like most modern programs it's shooting ahead fast in the drawing department but always lagging in the tool path department. And they always put milling path development ahead of lathe path development for some reason.
Maybe it has something to do with most modern shops having lathe guys and mill guys where in the old days you did it all?